St. Jimmy said:

Im of the mind they're ok for cargo ships, transports and other stuff, but for a warship you've not got enough for damage control and ability to soak casualties in a conflict to fill critical positions... for privateering, piracy and other assasult work you'd want at least a large warship + 1/2 again for taking prize ships and holding ground.

Probably a few house-ruled bonuses you could work in to conflicts with extra crew/troops, the sticking point is the ship taking hits and instead of scrubbing off a few hundred when you lose some hull integrity, you might end up scrubbing off a few thousand. Which sort of defeats the purpose of them in the first place with the reserves getting ganked.

I know very little about how naval matters are depicted in the WH40K books, but I have some familiarity with naval history, and the Aubrey- Maturin series, which apparently heavily influenced Rogue Trader.

Why did navy ships of the 19th century have such large numbers of crew? Hundreds of men were packed onto small and large vessels like a nest of rats. The tasks of shipboard life require many men. The speed at which a crew could adjust their sails relied on having many men moving through the rigging. The large number of men served not only to speed the tasks of shipboard life, but to provide redundancy. What if some of our men are killed in a skirmish? We still want the vessel to be able to perform at its peak, so we brought extra. Also, can men work all day and night? There must be time for the men to rest and sleep, so having enough crewmen to maintain multiple work shifts is a must.

The Second reason for such a large number of men is that navy men were "soldiers". By dint of being a sailor, you were expected to be able to fight the guns, board enemy ships, and cut out to attack land based targets as well such as ports or naval emplacements. The more men you have for such endeavors, the more likely you are to succeed. Not only that, but should you capture an enemy vessel, you will need men to crew it, and yet maintain the efficacy of your own crew, until you can get the vessel back to your own port.

Much of the reason for the large numbers of crew has to do with various forms of redundancy.

The larger the ship, the more men you need to maintain it, and to run it at peak efficiency.

I am not the first to say many of these things in the thread, but I thought it might be good to organize them all in one post.

Good point, Legend, our replies drifted off-thread rather and that's a pretty good summary, I reckon. It's often overlooked that there was only a small Marine contingent on a Royal Navy ship in this [Age of Sail, obviously] period, if indeed there was one at all and their purpose wasn't so much to do the fighting on land or even aboard ship as it was to ensure what we would today call 'security' and potentially put down any armed ill-discipline or mutiny.

Though it's been said already, it is worthy of emphasis, since its consequences for crew demand are more far-reaching than people realize:

A ship that size is a town of 20.000 inhabitants.

It's not just a workplace for a lot of people. It's a place where people work, live, are born, and spend their free time and their hard-earned wages. Only a part of the crew operate the ship. The rest provide the first part, and each other, with the necessities and niceties of life. Almost any profession that would have a place in a contemporary town of 20.000 people would have a plausible role aboard the ship. I have a hard time to think of any service-provider that wouldn't.

And then there's the issue of shift work. If a particular system requires X people to operate it at any time, you'd need at least 2X people employed for it, and that's with 12 hour workdays and no days off. Only unskilled indentured labour could be made to do that. Skilled labour (which a significant amount would be needed of) doing 8 hour workdays would be working in 3 shifts, and accounting for days off, you'd probably need something like 3.5 people per post.

By the way, speaking of shifts, do you know what's really neat? In the Imperial calendar, a year is divided into 1.000 segments. Years are standard Terran years. That means that one segment corresponds to (approx.) 8 hours, 46 minutes. Hence, if one shift is one segment long and there are three shifts on a ship, the crew will experience a fairly natural diurnal rhythm (one shift sleep, one shift work, one shift free time) where a "day" would be 26h 15min long.

The problem with the (in reality very large) crews that are given in RT is volume of space that life support alone takes up (about 20m3 per person). the more live crew you have, the larger a percentage of the ship has to be given over to keeping them alive. Unfortunetly, we know how much space is given over to weapons and (approx) engines in Imperial designs, and the approx size of the ship and thicknesses of armor. We'll say that a battleship has a crew twice FFG's numbers for crew of a cruiser. that's 190k people or so. It would require a volume of almost 10% of the ships mass be given over to life support. Admittedly this could be spread out throughout the ship, but it still doesn't change that there is not enough room when you factor in all the other parts of the ship with it.

A ship the size of, say, the Nimitz can have a few thousand crewmen because it doesn't have to contain the equipment to recycle the atmosphere or torpedo tubes that throw torps the size of the empire state building. Chambers sites numbers that seem more reasonable from a life support point of view, 1k-2k per HP in BFG, a battleship could feasibly have 12-25k people on board, including common sailors, allowing more room for important things, like more ammo and fuel storage.

Thus: Lunars might have 8-16k people on board, dauntless 6-12k crew, frigates probably around 2k and raiders probably around 1k (I seem to recall at some point reading a cobra could operate with 750 men.) Freighters and hauler probably even less. in Fluff at one point six men and some servitors manage to operate a transport ship.

These are also including marine detachments... errr... navel provosts... techs, and anything else that requires food, water and air.

Ships that size are utterly impossible in the first place, just in terms of material properties, so worrying about the volume required for life support being incorrect is a bit... silly? The background says that they are there and that they live there for years, even decades at a time, so the question is whom they are and what they do, not where all the stuff that keeps them alive is.

Gaidheal said:

How so? I can't think of any particular effect upscaling would have that would render them impossible.

And as for the 3000-man crew of the Nimitz class carriers, the point with the comparison was not to take a stance at whether supporting such a big crew was plausible, but rather an answer to the question of whether there'd be sensible things to do for everyone aboard.

Incidentally, even we take your figures, the Nimitz complement is 6,000 or so, requiring 120,000 cu. m, if we do a simplistic volume calculation (vastly oversizes it) the Nimitz is 330 by 75 by 12 metres, which gives a little under 300,000 cu. m, so more than a third of its space given over, probably more like half of its real volume. A Lunar's complement at 20,000 say? So, 400,000 cu. m, now a Lunar is apparently 5,000 metres long and we want twice that volume to have a similar ratio, so 800,000 / 5,000 is 160 sq. m for the cross-sectional area. That's approximately 12.6 by 12.6 metres . In other words, no problem.

Konrad - you posted while I was typing between TV programs, so to answer what you asked; you've not considered the forces that accleration at even a very moderate level would do. Bear in mind that being anywhere a planet would do that. The thermodynamics are even more damning, though, I am afraid (they also rule out 'planetwide cities', as it happens). It's Science Fantasy, firmly, my maties. ;¬)

Gaidheal said:

Fluff before the RT books actually 'tended' to follow Chamber's numbers. FFG altered them for reason I don't quite follow. Or perhaps they never read them at all. Either of which I'm fine with.

Except one detail. 12m^3 is a little more then half the 20m^3 worth of life support it takes to keep one person alive in space.

While I do agree largly on your assesment of thier structural integrity (not much above a frigate is actually practical with modern materials) this can be partially overcome by using diamond fullerines. Metal would never handel the stress, but it the underlaying loadbearing structure were nano assembed from diamond fullerines and then armored over it might work. (The ship would further have less mass than would be appearent as well.) If this is further augmented by using the directional thrusters as part of the ships accelleration, you could spread the stress throughout the structure.

That's metres, nothing to do with cubic metres. I'm sorry if you didn't follow the maths and it was perhaps a bit snarky of me but the calculations show that a 5 km long cruiser, supporting 20,000 people, only needs to be 12.6 metres wide and 12.6 metres high. In other words, I was showing you how utterly vast the volume actually is, much, much, much larger than anything we could build, in fact.

As for material strength, nope, you're well past the physical limits (I.E. fundamental properties of matter) with a lot of the stuff in WH40K, I'm afraid. It's fantasy, pure and simple. Fantasy that I actual like, even if I'm irreverent, but I don't have any time for fanboy silliness or idiotic claims about possibility (not suggesting that you're one or making any, by the way).

Maybe we don't know as much about the universe and how it works as we think we do? After all, we do things now and take certain facts for granted that folks 38 thousand years ago would have said was plain, strait up, and irrevocably impossible to do much less even imagine... or just screamed a bit and beat us to death with a pointy rock, but the sentiment would be the same.

We know exactly what we think we know, I'm afraid. It'd be silly to say that we know everything, especially as we actually know some of the subjects we don't know everything about. In short, what we do know is not the stuff of guesswork or speculation and thermodynamics is especially in this category - nothing, absolutely nothing, isn't bound by what are called the laws of thermodynamics. The phsycial properties of matter, by and large, are also well understood. The so-called wave-particle paradox or wave-particle duality is something of a grey area in as much as current explanations can deal EM radiation as either being a wave effect or a particle stream but cannot deal the with idea of it being both at the same time (in reality, of course, it's neither but we don't have better models, yet).

In other words, "Woooh! There is spooky stuff and your godless science can't explain it!" only works in 40K (or other fantasy) in reality, no.

As for the claims about the past... the superstitious folk, possibly but the intellectuals wouldn't have. It's often imagined that 'mediaeval people thought the planet was flat, for example, but they really didn't. Many had never considered the question, since they were people who'd never left the settlement they were born in but those who had thought about it already knew that the surface of the world curved and those who had studied knew that it was a sphere. A great deal of our current medicinal understanding is merely a refinement of the details from what the Arabs recorded, they having taken it from Greek works. Science goes way, way, back - right back to 'wise old men' round the camp fire, if you think about it.

I'm just saying there could be a hell of a lot we don't know and don't know we don't know and what we do know is only based on what we have thus far experienced and witnessed. What seems entirely logical and sound at one time based on the information we have could turn out to have been misinterpreted, a conclusion drawn from partial information that, once a larger picture is seen and more information gathered only proves to be applicable under the circumstances we witnessed it under but not others that we are now witnessing, or an exception to the norm we were unaware of because all we had to base our understanding on was the exception and not the norm.

Sure, 40k is most definitly a sci-fantasy setting but then, most anything set 38,000 years into the future would have to be by dent of the massive amount of time between then and now. A lot can change in that span including understanding of what we think to be the basic principles of the universe. I'm fairly confident that out understanding of the basic principles of the universe are vastly different then they were 38,000 years ago and, that being the case, I can't see why they wouldn't be vastly different in anouther 38,000 years.

Edit: Just as an addition, unless I'm a bit behind in the times, we still have no clue what constitutes about 95% of the energy in the universe and we have no idea what the hell 30% of the alleged matter in the universe actually is. That's a pretty big chunk of don't-have-a-freaking-clue right there. Maybe some of that dark matter completely wipes it's ares with the laws of thermodynamics as we understand them... and what about that unidentified energy which we can't even assign a property to? There's a LOT we don't know and only know we don't know it because there's apparently some truly monumental holes in what we do know which very well could invalidate everything we think we know (perhaps that's why there's those holes?).

I understood what you were saying but, there being no polite way to put it, you were wrong, at heart. It's something I have heard a lot from people who don't get that when scientists talk about 'theory of ...' it doesn't mean they are unsure, it simply means that is the current explanation and in many cases, it's the entirely correct, will never be significantly altered, if altered at all, explanation. However, the only things scientists will assert as facts are the results which can be repeated, time after time, by anyone who cares to repeat the experiment. The theory which fully explains these facts will still be a theory and the popular usage of that word to mean "guess" is entirely misleading. Aye, there can be, undoubtedly are, things which we don't know and haven't even experienced yet but they cannot, by definition, alter much of what we already know .

The idea that scientific explanations are subject to radical change is a myth, by and large; in many cases the essence hasn't been revised in hundreds of years, in some cases, thousands. Seen through the lens of looking a long way back it can look that way but actually almost all the 'new' stuff explains phenomena that we have only produced recently and they haven't radically altered any previous bodies of understanding, either. For example, it's sometimes said that Einstein made Newton obsolete but that's not correct, really. Einstein's later work shows that there are tiny, tiny errors in calculations made using Newtonian equations on the scale that Newton looked at but that over a much larger scale it becomes clear there is indeed error and this is because of what generally sum up as "relativity" - the essence of Newton's mechanics is entirely correct and only lacks some tiny constants that he couldn't see were needed because the results were so close to what we now can show as correct, at least on the scale of this universe... Could this situation be repeated? I don't see why not, but even if it is, as I say, it wouldn't be obsoleting the earlier work, per se, so much as modifying it with regards to parameters not previously considered or encountered. In other sense, I suppose, it was very radical but consider that those Newtonian equations remain the basis for a great many calculations and simulations because very few situations bring into play the factors that Special Relativity and later General Relativity take into account.

Anyway, not so much behind the times as a 'popular' simplification. I would talk about that a bit but... way of topic? And my own understanding is likely to be a bit dated, as well. Suffice to say that people I trust, in the field, assure me that it's not particulary troublesome in many ways and it's certainly not considered some new type of matter, per se, so much as it's not understood how to build a new model that properly takes all this into account and still works. This is a situation that's occurred before and been solved, it will be again, no doubt.

I'll counter that with scientists used to claim the universe was infinite and static. That said... I'll add that Graver, you're assuming that the sudden, and massive, increase in human technology and science in the last century will continue at that pace. However, human history is also filled wither periods of little or no advancement at all.

@Gaidheal

I think we're not talking about the same thing here. What I'm talking about is that the food/water/ life support for 20k people for one year would have a volume of 400k m^3 (approx 20m^3 per person) which would be 80m x 80m x 5km long. That's not getting into things like torpedoes, which are a little over a million m^3 in volume EACH and ships seem to carry at least a salvo or two of these, or the magazines for all the other weapons on board.

Let's look at total volumes:

A lunar class is approx 5,000,000,000m^3 (approximation based off of GW mini)

Approx 1/100 of that space will be pressurized areas accessible to the crew, or 50,000,000 m^3 (the rest being armor, engines, mechanical systems, exterior defense turrets, etc.) (used modern space craft for this estimate)

Three quarters of that would be given over to areas for engine access/fuel storage and weapon related areas (magazines, interior areas of macrocannon batteries, engine access corridors, etc) (used a battleship and GW mini for estimate), leaving 12,500,000m^3

Now, hanger bays, work shops and fabrication areas, medical facilities, kitchens, officers quarters, armories, escape pods, command and control, spare part stowage, cargo areas, and ships gravity plating. 3,000,000m^3 remaining. (used battleship for estimate)

Now we add berths for the men. Hmm... if we assume voidsman's quarters are the average for the remaining crew, and a voidsman gets a 6'x8'x10' berth (rather then a navy bunk) that's 3,000,000m^3 there for 20k men. We're out of space before we even got to life support and food storage.If we halve it (10k) everything fits, and there is even a little space left over. Which fits the Chambers model.

Fantasy or not, they aren't 'ships of holding'.

Back when I was designing game supplements (for fun and no profit) for another game system, part of that was a space-ship section and I had to calculate where everything was going, basically I rolled life support into the living quarters. Not because it was a shortcut, but simply because that was where it would be factored into when you design your ship. However, upon working out the actual calorie intake of a single human being, the amount of supplies you have to take on, factoring in water recycling, waste reclamation effiency of about 97%, was 1ton of supplies, per person per 1000hours.

Oh, I've done the calculations for 'real', too for supplements for Traveller. Problems of scale dog almost every scifi setting out there; entire support fleets carrying food for every warship, planets that need hundreds of freighters to arrive daily, etc, etc. However, I worry about that much less in 40K because there are huge breaks with reality long before that. :¬)

Baron - As the population increases you gain some 'economy of scale' savings with regards to life-support and the proportion of life-support to other matériel increases up from the figure you would find with a modern space vehicle. Let's also not forget that we're talking about a setting with 'Magic Tech' as it is; if we can handwave powerswords, plasma pistols and Warp drives we can certainly handwave improved life-support even if it presented a huge problem. A bigger deal is actually the volume of food, as pointed out, something I ignore completely in every setting, pretty much, as just about none of them take it into account. What you had to say about the 'huge increase' in tech was my very next train of thought when I posted last but I have to admit, I think we're flogging a lot of very speculative stuff to death without pinning down anything important or solid, so I just left it there.

Anyone who really does want 'hard science' in their setting could do worse than look at the Transhuman Space (GURPS) stuff.

Realistically (dumb word for 40k, but there it is) 24,000 crew on a ship 1.6km long and 400m wide is entirely plausible. You have to divide that by the number of shifts and days worked. So if you had 3 shifts working 7 days a week you have 8000 people per shift, with no days off and 8 hour workdays. Figure that about 10%-15% are tech-priests in the engineering sections (reactors, engines, ect.), you now have (at 15%) 6800 people to keep a ship that size running. That includes people working in shipboard convenience stores, hospitals and clinics, gunnery decks, cargo masters, magazine crew (not the kind you read), lighter fuel techs (the small vessels that are used for ship to ship transfers, like star trek shuttles), various mechanics, janitors, security staff, NCO's, officers, and other management, specialists in special gear (augury readers, helmsmen, pilots, comms officers, ect.), navigators, astropaths, menials, and I'm sure I've missed some. Not only that but you have to account for families. Would a modern naval sailor be willing to leave his family behind for decades or longer? Prolly not, so you have hangers on in there too.

Frankly for ships this size, the crew seems almost too low.

the problem is, once again, food storage for that many people. Remember that the ships are supposed ot store everythign they need for six months to a year on board. Using the US Navy as an example, you can't do that with a very large crew. There are huge chains of supply that provender the ships, and frankly, no such thing exists in RT (at least, not RAW. My players put in to restock every six to eight weeks.) Occasionally some vague references are made to convoys and chains of supply in Fluff for the Navy, but Rogue Traders have to carry it all with them (one reason that the early explorers tended toward smaller crews.)

Ships of the size in RT would be too heavy to move at any kind of useful speed. The whole spaceships conceit itself relies on thrust-to-fuel-weight ratios that simply are not possible, and even if they were possible, would make the ship's engines the most powerful weapons it had, more than strong enough to crack planetary crusts.

Ok, leme run the numbers. And these will be averaged, and highly speculative.

A havoc-class raider (the ship I used in my previous post) is 1.6km long, 400m wide, and I would assume 400m tall. This takes out the room for the raised bridge and other things. That gives us a total volume of 256,000,000m3. Now lets take out 20% of that as hull, armor and bulkheads, leaving us with 204,800,000m3 of space. Now a Havoc-class has a space of 40. This is an abstract number, but we can make it work. If we divide our 204,800,000m3 of available space into 40 units, that means that each unit is 5,120,000m3 of volume. So now we begin with the plasma drive taking up 51.2M m3, now that sounds about right for both engines and fusion reactors doesn't it? That's a tremendous amount of space, and I could easily see it taking up that much of a ship.

Next comes the warp engines, also taking up 51.2M m3. Since I have no idea how they operate, the physics behind them, or anything else like that, I will just say that I could see machinery that rips a whole in the dimensional fabric of the universe requiring that much space. While I'm on it geller fields require no space according to the ship construction rules, so I can only assume they are part of the warp engine requirements (I would hope so) and thus they are included in the 51.2M m3 of the warp engine and its associated equipment.

Void shields for a ship of this class take up only 5.12M m3 of space, again, because we don't have adequate knowledge of the physics required I can only assume that the generators for the shields and their associated equipment also require that much space.

Ships bridge also takes up 5.12M m3 of space, only double that if it is armored. While it stretches the imagination to think that a bridge would require that much space, I can see it if you include not just the operating bridge, but the CIC, augury banks, com systems, and the whole bridge superstructure that extends off of the ship. The superstructure for the bridge also houses the astropathic choir, and the navigator stations, and in all likely-hood it also houses senior officers quarters, meeting rooms, tactical computers, map rooms, and the like. I suppose I can see the bridge requiring that much space.

Life support for ships of this class require another 5.12M m3 of space. This seems like a lot of space for water purifiers, oxygen generators, and air scrubbers. I strain to believe that since the life support on a submarine requires much of the same equipment and doesn't take up nearly as much space, though the difference in crew may account for some of it, I would expect an economy of scale to cut into the amount of space required. For the moment, lets assume that it is what it is, and be on our way. As a side note, current life support requirements for a human in space is 20m3 per person if I recall correctly, however for 24k people that would make the required space on this vessel only 480,000 m3, but lets assume that we are on the right track and keep on, even if it doesn't make sense.

Lastly we have crew quarters. For a ship of this class that requires approx 15.4M m3 of space according to the rules. That equates to 640m3 of space per person on the ship, all 24,000 of them. For those of us in the U.S. that's over 2000 cu.ft of room per person on the ship. Now I don't know about the rest of you but I don't take up that much space as far as living accommodations, so some of that room has to be reserved for food stores. Even if the average crew member only gets 150m3 of living space, that still leaves 490m3 of space for provisions per person, now that only accounts for food and necessities, water is provided by life support, and so I can see someone only needing 490m3 of provisions for awhile. Though it would have to be rationed.

Now where does all this math leave us with spare room? 71.68M m3 is about what we have left and we have only about 10.24M m3 less if we upgraded life support one step and armored our bridge. So lets add our weapons, and we will go big using 2/3 of our available space on weapons systems, each of the two taking up around about 20.5M m3 of space. I can only assume that this includes ammunition magazines, and equipment to actually use the weapons, not just the weapons themselves.

So whats left? Just shy of 20.5M m3 of space that can be used for cargo holds, crew reclamation facilities, extended supply vaults, shrines, libraries, and the like.

What does all this number crunching suggest? Well to me it suggests that in a ship that large, there is more than enough space for not just the equipment required to run a vessel that massive, but also for the people. As for food stores, I can easily see some of the numbers I have calculated being able to be fudged a little, since as I said earlier, I honestly don't believe that either the bridge or life support requires as much space as they take up in the rules, but perhaps part of the life support is food storage. Who knows. What I do know is that despite the fact that the numbers are huge, and probably not entirely accurate, I can easily see that a ship that size could support itself for long periods of time, and still have enough work for all of the 24K people on board to do.

" would make the ship's engines the most powerful weapons it had, more than strong enough to crack planetary crusts."

Oh hell yes, these ugly bastards use plasma, basically pointing the ship at the planet bum first and going 100% throttle up will pretty much remove all life, water and atmosphere from a very large area one side of the planet, its fairly much the equivalent of being hit with a solar flare. Which is 'pretty bad', but not nearly as nasty as when its done with a warp engine... for everyone concerned

Gaidheal said:

As much as I like 40k its just one of those things you have to suspend a lot of disbelief for, canon presented in novels and the majority of the books is a whimsical affair with consistancy at best. That is one of the better things about FFG taking it on in some respects that there will be at least a fairly regular amount of product that adheres to consistant ideas about how things work. Personally I'd like to do fan-stuff for the setting but being water-boarded by GW lawyers isn't on my list of fun things to do and some of the fans tend to take it all in verbatin and dont like development outside the inconsistant, wonky cardboard box of whats been written before.

Course, the less said about Frank Herbert, Michael Moorecock, Phillip K **** novels and comparisons between 40, less said the better... shhh

My Cruiser has a crew component of 95,000. Because this is the Imperium, everything is manually done. I kind of envisioned it a little like BSG where nothing is networked and everything needs a pair of hands to make it work. Also the ship must be operational 24/7 so you dont need just one workforce, you need 4 or 5 duplicate workforces depending on the number of watches you run. Then everyone has to be fed, washed, confessed and entertained. Thus when you start breaking it down you really need this many bodies.

Our crew is organised into Divisions according their ship board function and contain the following sub groups -

Collegiums - nominally responsible for keeping the peace in their division and maintain a 'home guard/ police force'. Responsible for running and regulating 'quasi-legal' recreational activities.

Maintenance and repair - All divisions contain their own maintenance and repair sections who work closely with Damage Control officers in the Command Crew.

Workers - All Divisions will contain workers (note Servitors are components, not workers)

Officers - All Divisions will contain officer cadre that is reponsible for the conduct and efficiency of their division.

Professional Lodges - Each Division will maintain a professional 'lodge' specific to their Divisional duties. This is to promote pride in the Division's work and closely linked to Ship-wide recreational events and Divisional prayers to the Emperor.

The Divisions are as follows although note this is not military - strictly ship's crew and its not exhaustive-

Command Crew - Adeptus Mechanicus/ Astropath / Damage Control / Specialist Bridge Crew

Engine - Adeptus Mechanicus / Wrenchers

Life Sustainer Crew - Adeptus Mechanicus / Scrubbers / Plumbers / Electricians

Logistics and Cargo Crew - Animal pens and butchers / Catering / Commissary officers / Farmers and pickers fungi, bean and kelp farms / Water storage and collection / Loaders and Dockers Sentinel pilots / Mining and Resources / Munitions, Servitor manufacture and repair / Personnel and ship's stores / Cleaning / Laundry

Manufactorium Crew - Adeptus mechanicus/ wrenchers / Loaders and dockers

Medicae Crew - Adeptus Sororitas / Military Medics / Orderlies / Pharmaceuticals and stores / Ship's medics

Sensor Crew - Adeptus Mechanicus / Electricians

Ship's Security - Marine regiment / Provosts / Acro Flagellent Penal company / Brig guards

Ecclesiarchy - Confessors / Lodge inspectors / Teaching school cadre

Void Shields - Adeptus Mechanicus / Wrenchers

Warp engine - Adeptus Mechanicus / Wrenchers

Weapons Crew - Adeptus Mechanicus / Gun crew / Armourers

Ship's Maintenance - Adeptus Mechanicus/ Wrenchers

Air Crew (Fighters / Bombers / Assault boats) - Armourers / Hanger Crew / Pilots Thunderbolt Fighters, Marauder Bombers, Arvus Lighters, Aquila Transports, Bulk Shuttles etc)

Finally we run Ship time on a 24 hour day with 5 x four hour watches and 2 x 2hr 'dog watches' - this allows time to feed the crew.

Trouble Entendre said:

One thing that's really become apparent to me in the last few months of 'legitimate research' into the 40k universe is that the setting seems very much to embrace the impossible. From an in-setting perspective, this makes more sense than it might initially seem.

One of the common complaints/observations from the more scientifically-minded of the fanbase is that many elements of the technology of the Imperium (let alone other races, though the Imperium seems to get the brunt of this, being human and thus closest to our own perspectives - people seem to care less that Eldar or Ork technology makes less scientific sense) are simply impractical, infeasible and/or impossible. It's happened in this very thread. The statement so frequently made is that we know enough about the universe now that any new revelations will not shake the foundations of everything we think we understand...

...except that this doesn't really apply to 40k. Tens of millennia before the 41st Millennium, the Emperor set into motion events and circumstances that would bring about the existence of the Adeptus Mechanicus, using a being speculated to be the dormant C'Tan known as the Void Dragon. The Necrons and the C'Tan in general (and the Void Dragon in particular) are known to treat the laws of physics like vague suggestions. That alone provides the more advanced examples of Imperial technology with a basis in something that is known to flaunt the laws of physics. Beyond that, is the discovery of the Warp - an alternate dimension of thoughts and dreams made real... that should be considered a more significant scientific discovery than anything we could find in real life.

Between (admittedly-rudimentary) C'Tan derived technology and the potential influence of the Warp, the heights of science and technology that mankind could have reached during the Dark Age of Technology is something that clearly and deliberately defies everything we understand about science and technology. Given that the Age of the Imperium is reliant upon the scraps and left-overs of that impossible technology, it stands to reason that it can accomplish things that are impossible by our standards, even if the people creating and maintaining it don't necessarily understand how or why it can do that...